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“... Bobby J. Ewing, I don’t believe you.’ The first episode of Dallas began, in 1978, with Pamela’s stilted expression of incredulity. Within two years the city famous for hosting President Kennedy’s assassination was celebrated instead for the attempt on the life of Bobby’s brother, JR. A hundred and twenty million Americans tuned in to see who had shot him – more than had voted in the previous Presidential election ...”

“... under Deng Xiaoping. The Senderistas own no allies, hold dialogue with no one. According to Nicholas Shakespeare, they accept no funds from abroad and their weapons of choice are stolen guns and hand-made beer-can bombs hurled from slings made of llama hair. Theirs will be one revolution without the AK-47. The elusive and wholly intransigent ...”

“... gave one-fingered salutes, honking their horn until we were out of sight. One of the strengths of Nicholas Shakespeare’s In Tasmania is that he comes from an island far away. He can play the part of a baffled British visitor, asking awkward questions which land him right at the heart of the most sensitive issues. His outsider status ...”

“... enjoying a little golden age. Air and Fire, like recent novels by Louis de Bernières and Nicholas Shakespeare, conveys a powerful sense of faraway places. As with de Bernières and Shakespeare, Thomson’s traveller’s tale gravitates to the Hispanic New World and invokes the tricks of writers like Vargas ...”

“... tragedies – Julius Caesar, Old Hamlet, Banquo – you never get very far from paternity in the Shakespeare canon. Nor is fatherhood presented solely as a matter between father and son, in the manner highlighted to the point of overdetermination in the battle scene near York in Act II of Henry VI Part 2, when the stage is simultaneously occupied by a ...”

“... the Telegraph, where he was lead reviewer. Exactly how and why that paper’s literary editor, Nicholas Shakespeare, came to send Powell’s Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers to Waugh remains obscure. As recently as January last year Shakespeare was still trying to explain the course of events in the ...”

“... In his own time, Shakespeare was much better known to the reading public as a poet than as a playwright. Venus and Adonis went through ten editions before his death in 1616, and another six before 1640. His other long narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, was less popular, but it, too, circulated far more widely than any of the plays, appearing in six editions during his life, and in two more by 1640 ...”

“... were – or became – mentally deranged. Most of the early fairy paintings are illustrations to Shakespeare (and it would have been desirable to have the relevant passages included in text panels), but what they bring to mind most often is Victorian poetry, and above all Tennyson with his predilection for close focus and precious metamorphosis (‘the ...”

“... may be most valuable to students of the theatre and of spectacle. They describe in detail how Shakespeare was performed by Kean and Kemble, the sweetness and the tragic power of Giuditta Pasta’s voice, the marvellous imitation of morning mist in a London pantomime, a performance by Billy the rat-killing dog. The high art is not always easy to ...”

“... sinister than alluring, I came only belatedly to an interest in grottoes. So too, it seems, did Shakespeare, who never used the word ‘grotto’, not even after the arrival of the French hydraulic engineer and garden designer Salomon de Caus at the Jacobean court encouraged the fashion for fancifully ornamented damp underground chambers that had been ...”

“... the crusaders of Tasso, the irony of Cervantes, and, most remarkable of all, the fact that ‘Shakespeare borrowed and reshaped a lot from medieval narrative.’ We turn the page again and find that Eco is concerned to distinguish the different dreams of the Middle Ages entertained by modern man. No 7 reads as follows: ‘The Middle Ages of ...”

“... In 1964, the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth, two very different books appeared. Anthony Burgess’s tribute to the poet, Nothing Like the Sun, was a boisterous biographical novel full of sugared sack and bawdry, with sombre undertones of decay. Taking literally the references in Shakespeare’s sonnets to a mistress ‘black as hell’, Burgess made the Dark Lady of his story a voluptuous East Indian who, after seducing the dramatist, inspired the tragic plays of his maturity by giving him a dose of syphilis ...”

“... As I was reading Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare on the train there was a woman sitting near me doing a deal on the phone. She was getting agitated. ‘But I have to transfer the money to Mr Shakespeare himself,’ she said. ‘No … Listen, I really need to speak to Mr Shakespeare ...”

“... Bristol monk, and the equally immature William Henry Ireland, who forged manuscripts by Shakespeare before which Boswell knelt in adoration, apologists have found a degree of extenuation in claiming that theirs were the follies of ambitious but misguided youth. Still, their guilt remains unquestioned, as does that of the monarch of them all, the ...”

“... Not to know Goethe,’ A.W. Schlegel wrote poetically, ‘is to be a Goth.’ Nicholas Boyle begins the preface to Volume One of his biography of the great man by stating, altogether correctly alas, that more must be known, ‘or at any rate there must be more to know’, about him than about almost any other human being ...”